Hacking Educationhttp://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com
Helping parents feed inquisitive mindsMon, 04 Aug 2014 22:40:46 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.15 Essential Strategies to Excel in your Freshman Year of Collegehttp://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/08/04/home/5-essential-strategies-to-excel-in-your-freshman-year-of-college/
http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/08/04/home/5-essential-strategies-to-excel-in-your-freshman-year-of-college/#commentsMon, 04 Aug 2014 22:40:46 +0000http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/?p=67Many students experience a culture shock when they enter college — not because they finally have no curfew or can eat whatever they want in the cafeteria, but because the academic expectations professors & teaching assistants have for their students are dramatically different than most high schoolers have experienced.

In college, students are expected to be independent learners — they have to take initiative for learning (going to class, visiting office hours when they struggle, interpreting an instructor’s comments on papers, etc) without anyone looking over their shoulder. What usually poses more of a difficulty is that students are also expected to engage in original thinking. In high school, students are largely required to regurgitate material that the teacher or textbook have presented; in college, students need to start thinking outside the material they are presented to arrive at new conclusions.

But this transition does not have to be difficult — here are five strategies every incoming college freshman should adopt in order to successfully transition from the high school classroom to the college lecture hall or discussion section.

#1: Learn to write effectively and revise your work

How many times do you sit in front of a blank screen, terrified? Or, you write your paper and, in the final paragraph, the light bulb goes off: that was what I was trying to say… In “Shitty First Drafts,” Anne Lamott recommends that you write a “down draft’ — a draft written after you’ve turned off your inner critic. You sit down and write, without worrying about grammar, word choice, or even coherence. This sounds like the recipe for a disastrous paper (and grade), but that’s because it’s just the first step.

Once you’ve figured out what you want to say, then you should revise your paper to reflect how you want to say it. When I taught freshman composition, my students regularly commented that this was the first class that they regularly revised papers. In high school, they were accustomed to reading through a paper to make sure there were no grammatical errors and then submitting it. Contrary to popular opinion, this is not revision, but editing.

Revision involves reading through a paper and evaluating how convincing the argument is, how clearly it’s presented, and whether it effectively engages with other people’s arguments. Then, only after the paper is polished, do we edit it for grammar, style, and formatting. (Sidenote: this paragraph reveals the secret formula that your instructor will use to grade your college work.)

#2: Learn how academic arguments are made

Listening to a lecture can feel like being tossed into a completely different rhetorical mode. Understanding that rhetorical mode is crucial to deciphering what your professor is saying as well as comprehending the textbooks and articles that you’ll be required to read.

A book I have regularly used in the college classroom is They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. The authors argue that academic writing is in essence a conversation between you and anyone else who has written about your topic before. Their book also reveals how to engage in that conversation — they introduce several basic “moves” of academic writing: specific steps that every academic author/speaker has internalized and use whenever they deliver an undergraduate lecture or write an article for publication. They Say, I Say not only outlines what those basic steps are, but it provides templates that the beginning writer can use to start incorporating them into paper drafts.

Reading They Say, I Say before you go to your first lecture or read your first college textbook will also help you understand precisely what’s important to pay attention to. It additionally prepares you to develop original ways of thinking about difficult material — to do more than say ‘this is what they said,’ but to also be able to say ‘and this is what I think about what they said.’

#3: Learn how to participate in a class discussion

In a typical class discussion, half the class sits in utter silence while five or six students dominate the conversation. The TA or instructor will try to draw quieter students out — sometimes by calling randomly on them — but these drive-by comments rarely help develop a conversation.

Successful students learn how to participate in class without dominating the conversation. This means listening carefully to the conversation and offering additional examples that support or challenge what someone else in class has just said. It’s a pretty basic skill, but very hard to master.

If you’re having trouble speaking in class, require yourself to respond to one other person in every class; once you’re in the habit of speaking, you’ll keep doing it. If you’re having trouble coming up with something to say, think about what interested you in the reading or what frustrated you or what made you curious to know more. Or, think about what you’ve learned in another class that contributes more to what you’re learning in this class. These are the building blocks to effectively driving a conversation (which is really what a class discussion should be) and are very similar to the writing you’ll be doing in class.

#4: Learn how to talk to professors

In the middle of the spring semester, freshmen realize they need recommendation letters — for summer internships or jobs, for programs within the university, for scholarships, and so forth. Then they realize that none of their professors even know their names, much less would be likely to recognize them on the street. While this is less true for liberal arts schools where the classes are small, if a professor only sees you in the classroom, they won’t know why you’re taking their class or how it fits in with your larger academic interests or career plans. It’s these details that separate humdrum recommendation letters from ones that communicate how well you’ll do at whatever you’ve applied to do.

So regularly attend office hours for at least one of your professors. Ideally, this should be a professor with whom you might want to work in the future or one who you think could write you a solid letter of recommendation (either because you perform well in that class or because you’re fascinated by the material). If you’re having trouble talking with your professor, don’t worry. Just go to their office armed with a question about something in the reading or lecture that confused you or that you want to know more about. Professors are accustomed to talking so they can usually keep the conversation going! (There are some exceptions — I once visited a professor who could only look at the floor during our conversation!)

#5: Create a narrative about your studies

Particularly the first year of college, you’ll take random classes in scattered subjects, few to none of which directly prepare you for your major or future career. But the value of a liberal arts education is that learning different types of material and being able to put them together facilitates original thinking and new ideas. For example, Geoffrey Chaucer once wrote an entire poem about a navigational instrument called the astrolabe (oddly enough, he also named his child after the instrument!). And many poets have been intrigued and inspired by scientific discoveries. These sorts of inter-connections are all over your studies — finding them will help you understand the world we live in. They’ll also help you write more interesting papers and have interesting contributions when speaking in class or with professors.

But you also need to explain to others how your college career has benefited you — how classes in widely divergent fields actually helped you prepare you for your future career, how they make you qualified to think critically and creatively. You’ll be asked such questions when you apply for your first job and, when you write a cover letter or graduate/scholarship application, you need to explain how what you’ve already done prepares you for what you want to do. Be prepared to say, “this is what I learned in this class and how I intend to apply it to other classes/jobs/etc.” and you’ll get the most value out of your classes — even if you initially think a class will be a waste of time.

]]>http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/08/04/home/5-essential-strategies-to-excel-in-your-freshman-year-of-college/feed/0The truth about my student loanshttp://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/07/11/home/why-is-my-student-loan-interest-rate-so-high/
http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/07/11/home/why-is-my-student-loan-interest-rate-so-high/#commentsFri, 11 Jul 2014 19:48:57 +0000http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/?p=59A Tale of Two Loans: When I went to college, I took out a small amount of student loans. And the interest rate was quite low: a variable rate of 1.75%, which today stands at 2.35%. When I went to graduate school, my loan rate, despite the 2008 financial collapse: 6.8%.

The mortgage rate on my house is half that.

When I drive down to Portland, I always chuckle (without the humor) at the sign offering boat loans for under 2.5% APR.

People always say that those two loans are so cheap because they’re backed by something tangible — the bank can always repossess the house or the boat. But not that education.

But guess what?

The federal government guaranteed every student loan that I took out. This means they promised private student loan companies that if I defaulted, the loan company would be fully reimbursed. In other words, the loan company took less risk on my student loans than another did on my house.

Anna: A senior in high school, Anna is passionate about organic food and healthy living. In a high school elective class, she wrote a promising business plan that combined those two passions. In the summer after high school, she will intern at an organic health food store. Instead of going to college, she wonders if she should apply for more internships — to learn the ropes of starting a business while making important networking contacts. Her parents wonder: can Anna start a business while simultaneously paying off tens of thousands of dollars in student loans? Should she put a promising career path on hold for four years?

Zeb: Also a senior in high school, Zeb doesn’t know what he wants to do. He’s grown up in a middle class family and college is a rite of passage. And so he dutifully applied. But he has no specific academic goals or career passions. As he looks through the course catalogue he notices that his first semester classes will be entirely general education requirements — freshman math, freshman writing, freshman science, freshman history. He’s already bored. At least there will be parties and plenty of time to hang out with new friends.

Should everyone go straight from high school to college?

We routinely frame the debate about whether students should go to college as a purely monetary consideration: a choice between a lifetime of financial struggle and the (presumed) certainty of a well-paying job. We never talk about whether teenagers should delay school, gaining some life experience and perspective before hunkering down for years of study. We ignore the fact that not every high school senior is ready for college or knows what he or she will study once there. We also ignore statistics that quantify the cost of this lack of passion: 30% of all college graduates leave without a degree (or the financial benefits of one). Instead, we expect teenagers to spend thousands of dollars taking courses that (might) help them ‘find their passions.’

Instead, we should encourage many students to take a year off before college. My fictional examples of Anna and Zeb above are two types of students who would strongly benefit from waiting to attend college.

In Europe and Australia, many students take off the year before college. They use the time to travel. (It’s the modern day descendent of the medieval pilgrimage and the Grand Tour.) Many of those who take a gap year come from wealthy families who pay for it. But not all do. Those who don’t work for a few months, then take the next six to nine off and travel the world on a budget. Then they come home and start university.

A working gap year

In America, a gap year is usually treated as a chance to gain specific experience that will motivate students to find a career or further their experience if they already have one in mind.

Even colleges often encourage their incoming freshman to consider a brief hiatus. Harvard reports that nearly a third of their incoming class takes a gap year. Greg Buckles, the Dean of Admissions at Middlebury, writes that gap years help us remember the true purpose of education: “to discover what it is we truly care about and want to pursue further, and thereby come as close as possible to realizing our own potential.” He also notes that students who have taken a gap year before coming to Middlebury routinely earn higher grades and participate in campus life more fully than those who came straight from high school.

This makes sense — a gap year motivates teenagers to learn with a goal in mind, one that doesn’t just lead to a career path, but to a meaningful career path. By taking a gap year, teenagers gain a new perspective: they see how their education prepares them for a future career and other interests, they interact with people outside their normal social circle, and they learn to budget and manage their money.

And for parents worried that delaying school for one year will lead to never going back to school, it rarely does. Ironically, taking time off from school makes one more likely to complete school in the first place.

Many students who take gap years come from wealthy backgrounds and attend expensive schools. That doesn’t mean that a gap year must be expensive. Programs run the gamut in terms of price. Some programs cost about what the first year of college costs, but others cost a fraction of that and could be affordable to any teenager who has a typical summer job. Many volunteer programs charge a small program fee, but provide room and board, further reducing costs. Some programs, like AmeriCorps provide stipends and completion grants to use at accredited colleges.

What might a teenager do on a gap year?

Volunteer in a school or clinic in a foreign country, building language skills, empathy, and diverse work experience.

Live at home and work or volunteer with an internship in a potential career.

Take an intensive foreign language course or study marine biology on a ship.

Work locally for AmeriCorps (which also offers a scholarship to an accredited university)

Work for a few months and then take a train trip across Asia

Teach English abroad (if you earn TEFL certification before you go, many countries do not require a college degree)

Now consider an alternative future for our two high school seniors, one in which each took time off immediately following high school:

Anna: After her summer internship, Anna worked at an organic farm, which provided room and board. After doing this for the fall season, she applied to AmeriCorps and was placed in a job developing school gardens and healthy eating plans for local schools. She worked at this job for two years, developing contacts in her field, leadership skills, and other skills. After two years, she was ready to take the next step: she used the education credit she earned as part of her AmeriCorps grant and enrolled part-time in a local community college, taking mostly business classes. She used the rest of her day to immerse herself in the local business community, building contacts, and landing a part-time job that let her apply the academic skills she was learning in her evening classes. Soon she was ready to launch her own business.

Zeb: When Zeb received his admissions packet, he was surprised to see information (and even encouragement from the school’s Dean of Admissions) about deferring your enrollment and taking a year off before starting school. He’d always enjoyed sports and was shocked to learn that there were volunteer opportunities teaching soccer to underprivileged kids in South America. Since he wasn’t excited about school, he decided to apply. While teaching soccer, he realized that he enjoyed helping players avoid injuries. Zeb also, for the first time ever, saw the point of learning a foreign language, and he worked hard to develop near fluency in Spanish. He also discovered a love for Argentinian crime fiction. After a year, he was eager to attend school. He majored in Sports Medicine and Physical Therapy and minored in Spanish; he even wrote a few papers on South American popular fiction. After graduation, he joined a physical therapy company that specialized in treating recreational sports injuries. In his free time, he taught soccer to recent immigrants and started a Spanish-language book club at a local coffee shop.

Resources if You’d Like to Know more

The Gap Year Advantage — a complete guide to the various options available to American teenagers. Written by two parents whose son felt unmoored after high school. Working with a gap year consultant, he planned an ambitious year of world travel, volunteering across the world, practicing his language skills, and developing a new perspective on what he wanted to do with his life.

Many Ivy league and top US colleges encourage their students to take a gap year. Middlebury has collected a fabulous resource list if you’re interested in learning more about a gap year.

I launch into a carefully crafted lesson plan about writing personal narratives. I want my students to understand how stories make arguments just like more formal writing does. The course director has assured me that opening with a familiar genre will help my students transition easily into more formal college writing.

I pause when I see their foreheads knit together in puzzlement. A few raise their hands:

“Wait, I can use ‘I’ in an essay?”

“My teachers always told me not to use ‘I’ in an essay. We’re not supposed to share our opinion.”

“You’re sure I can use ‘I’ in an essay?”

My forehead knits together in puzzlement. Don’t they know how to write a personal essay? They wrote one to get into college!

Most teenagers only write one personal essay: the one they write for college applications

While I expected that my students had some training in how to write personal narratives, I’ve come to realize that most of them have only written one personal essay: the one that got them into college. And they were skeptical, almost universally, about the quality of that piece of narrative writing and trepidatious about repeating the experiment for a grade.

Writing in unfamiliar genres always feels impossible the first dozen times we try it. It’s becoming a cliché to allude to the 10,000 hours of practice necessary to master a task (and the veracity of the claim is suspect to begin with), but it’s unquestionably true that the beginning of any project is rough. Writing in an unfamiliar genre inspires bad writing — when we don’t know what to write, we turn to generalities, commonplaces, and banalities.

And what we write isn’t meaningful.

Here’s an experiment: tell me what you wrote your college admissions essay about. Yeah, I didn’t write anything particularly memorable either. Because, like you, I’d read very few personal essays and written none before I applied to college. And I actually never wrote another one until I applied to graduate school. It’s a little odd to ask students to acquire competency in an area that they will rarely be called upon to practice.

3 Strategies to Prepare Your Teenager for the College Admission Essay

But there are a few straightforward strategies any teenager can practice in the years (or months!) leading up to applying for college. These strategies introduce students to the personal essay genre and provide opportunities to practice its basic tenets so that they aren’t learning how to write a college essay at the very moment they’re called upon to master the genre.

While these strategies are specifically directed at writing a college admission essay, you’ll notice that they also echo my larger project of hacking education: viewing learning as a life-long experience, understanding that ‘academic’ learning is not the only type of valuable learning, and in general living an ‘examined life.’

Be Active & Involved

This is a piece of advice I find myself repeating a lot. Because it’s hard to lead an examined life in front of the computer or television. But it’s especially important for college admission essays because the Common Application essay questions ask about activities teenagers have been involved with: notable changes in belief or attitude, failures, accomplishments, and so forth. Students who are active in their schools and communities are more likely to have interesting stories that fit into such narrative categories.

But these interesting stories don’t have to be big ‘story-worthy’ events. For every story about a big trip to Japan that convinces John Hopkins University’s admissions committee to accept a student, they are also swayed by a story about someone’s height. The weightiness of the topic is not what makes these stories compelling; it’s the reflective qualities they reveal about their authors.

Model the examined life

The word essay didn’t originally mean a fully polished piece of writing; it meant an attempt to explain a topic. Writing a personal essay should be an activity of walking your reader through your thought process, of helping that reader to see why you believe what you believe.

Teenagers are very accustomed to analyzing books and movies, but if you ask them to apply those same skills to their own lives, they often struggle or fall back on generalities — I believe what I believe because I do.

Incorporating reflection into your everyday life is essential to training teenagers to articulate meaningful events in their life. Ask your teenager to explain their beliefs, annoyances, and experiences. Have them identify why their triumphs, failures, and discarded hobbies communicate who they are. Don’t just ask them to tell you that they enjoy or despise an activity, encourage them to explain why they have those feelings. Teenagers generally have strong opinions, but they are not often asked to analyze them or we often don’t communicate how those opinions reflect their larger world views or experiences.

If your teenager decides to become a vegan, you’ll probably ask her why. When she replies that she wants to save the animals or reduce industrial waste, push further on that. Ask what experiences in her life have brought her to that point.

The most successful personal essays don’t just answer a question in one way; they interrogate an issue, unwrapping layers and layers of thoughts, experiences, and assumptions.

But don’t just talk to your teenager. Have him start a journal, regularly writing not just about what happens, but what she thinks about what is happening. This only gives your teenager practice analyzing what happens to them, but it also helps them develop their own voice. Teenagers are more accustomed to speaking or texting their friends than they are to writing sustained prose; altering that balance will help them become more fluent and engaging writers.

Introduce them to a larger context

Most of us don’t read personal narratives or essays. But most teenagers are busy puzzling over the world they live in and experimenting with new ideas and approaches to the world. Reading essays can help them more clearly articulate their own positions because it helps them to see what others have already said and what makes their own approach unique.

I’ve read plenty of essays about mission trips, but the first drafts of these essays are always strikingly similar: I was shocked about how much we waste here in the US. Because this is such a revelation to most teenagers (it certainly was to me when I came back from studying abroad), they don’t realize that their startling recognition is a routine rite of passage. When they start reading essays about travel, they discover that their opinions exists within and connect to a larger conversation. That blend of universality and individuality is at the heart of what makes a personal essay vibrant and meaningful.

Here are my favorite resources for fantastic essays:

The Best American series publishes an annual series of books about everything from sports to science and nature writing. Not all of their essays are personal narratives, but they will show how authors write meaningfully about even seemingly mundane topics.

NPR’s This I Believe series asks individuals to explain one thing they believe in under 500 words. These essays are sometimes whimsical, serious, tragic, or folksy, and they capture the everyday voices of people who find meaning even in very small experiences.

]]>http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/06/14/home/your-action-plan-for-the-college-admission-essay/feed/1How do we create engaged classrooms?http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/05/29/home/how-do-we-create-engaged-classrooms/
http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/05/29/home/how-do-we-create-engaged-classrooms/#commentsThu, 29 May 2014 19:39:59 +0000http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/?p=45In a recent New York Times article, Michael S. Roth bemoans his students’ collective inability to construct an argument. Their argumentative process, he finds, consists only of one skill: battering the opposing side’s arguments by pointing out apparent contradictions. “But this is thin gruel,” he protests. Roth counters that students must embrace an author’s inherent contradictions and explore why he or she incorporated such contradictions. The answer is usually that such contradictions are meant to make us ask specific questions and then to come to new awarenesses about the topic under discussion. When we embrace this critical process, Roth concludes that “we “increas[e] our capacity to understand and contribute to the world — and reshape it, and ourselves, in the process.”

In other words, when students are trained not to simply rebut an argument, but to really engage with it by thinking through the argument, they are prepared to innovate and create new knowledge or new understandings about our world.

Roth assumes that students do not engage with arguments because they are not trained to do so. While I don’t disagree, the problem is more complex: students do not engage with academic arguments because such arguments often are or seem to be irrelevant. Arguments in the classroom tend to ask specialized, discipline-related questions that matter to the teacher, but often don’t connect to the student or the world we live in. When there is a disconnect between education and the ‘real world’, learning and the liberal arts become about rhetorical posturing rather than a practice that can, should, and will change the world.

I’m trained in the Humanities. The big Humanities question right now is: do the Humanities matter? (Other versions of this question: are books dead? do teenagers still read? should we have shorter English classes so that students can learn ‘real-world skills’ like woodworking?) The answer from the Ivory Tower is resounding: the Humanities do matter because we teach critical thinking skills, writing, and other tasks that are essential to most professional careers.

But.

I once read an academic forum where adults with Ph.D.s worried that if they could not find a tenure-track job they would end up … bagging groceries. How do we teach our students the tangible value of a liberal arts education if we don’t understand it ourselves? if the very people who argue that the liberal arts teach relevant skills are unable to see how their own skills are relevant?

What we need to do is transform our classroom practices into learning environments that provides discipline-specific skills to students and then show them why those skills matter.

DO WE ASK OUR STUDENTS GOOD QUESTIONS?

One reason it’s so difficult to translate academic skills outside the classroom is that many of the topics we teach in schools are isolated from the work that our students will do (and often are doing) outside the classroom. This doesn’t mean we should transform every subject into career prep. (Such a process limits student learning rather than expands it.) What it does mean is we should teach the big themes and skills of a discipline alongside explicit reference to why these concerns are important.

This is what separates the good teachers from the great: the ability to help us see how the classroom intersects with the world we live in, the world that we spend most of our waking hours in.

But this shouldn’t be what separates good and great teachers.

This should be what education is.

I spent many semesters as a TA for literature classes. Looking over my notes from a literature class, I see how we failed to do this for our students. We taught them, for example, how Spencer was influenced by Chaucer. We also asked them to think about the power of storytelling and why authors who were deeply engaged with the major political and religious issues of their day chose to write fiction. We failed our students not because we talked about these issues. We failed them because we only talked about these issues.

We did not ask the obvious question: how do these authors also relate to our present concerns? Why do we still read Chaucer and Spencer? Or, even more obviously, why did Spencer adapt Chaucer to being with? Not because he was particularly interested in Chaucer’s views on 14th century politics. But because Spencer found adapting Chaucer allowed him to talk effectively about contemporary political and religious concerns. In other words, Spencer’s deep knowledge of Chaucer and his works wasn’t a purely antiquarian project — it was a deeply relevant re-reading of literature. When we teach students about Chaucer’s 14th century politics or how he uses storytelling, we should use such conversations as entry points to talking about why we read Chaucer and what he has to tell us.

When we teach any work of literature, we should frame questions about theme, characterization, plot within a larger set of concerns about: ethics, justice, economic equity, familial relations, community, and so forth. These are the very issues that inspired writers to write, but they are the ones we avoid because we’re concerned about avoiding ‘political’ issues in the classroom.

But we cannot teach students how to argue effectively if they have nothing worth arguing about. We can teach them to go through the motions, but we cannot inspire them with the potential for what ideas can do.

]]>http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/05/29/home/how-do-we-create-engaged-classrooms/feed/2How to Motivate Your Teenagerhttp://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/05/19/home/how-to-motivate-your-teenager/
http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/05/19/home/how-to-motivate-your-teenager/#commentsMon, 19 May 2014 19:23:56 +0000http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/?p=42Last week I mentioned how critical it is that we engage students by giving them meaningful work. In this post, I’ll explore how parents can connect their teenager’s interests to their schoolwork and daily life. Later this week, I’ll explore this issue from the classroom perspective.

Studies remind us that when parents discuss their teenager’s school work with them, their academic performance improves. And while any given classroom contains a diverse set of interests, only some of which may be immediately apparent, parents know their teen’s interests and are uniquely suited to promote connections between schoolwork and their teen’s interests or daily activities.

HOW PARENTS CAN MOTIVATE TEENAGERS

#1:Expand their interests

When I was a child, my parents regularly looked for fun family activities: we visited the orchestra’s open house, a fantastic exhibit on Saudi Arabia, the science museum, the art museum, the botanical gardens, and so forth. So even before I started school, I had been exposed to how the arts, history/culture, science were incorporated into the world around me. I also began to view learning as a normal activity rather than something limited to school hours. But by the time I was a teenager, we stopped going to most of these cool events (the one exception was the orchestra’s yearly open house where I futilely tried to make a clarinet squeak). I did have other volunteer activities and hobbies that replaced these events and provided important foundations for my later interests to develop. But, unlike my early childhood, by the time I was a teenager, my activities became focused primarily on a fairly narrow band of interests when I could have continued to experiment with new ideas.

When was the last time you took your teenager: to art walk, to a poetry reading, to a lecture, to a maker faire, or (for older teenagers) to a networking meet-up?

These enrichment activities expose teenagers to new ideas, modes of thinking, and potential career paths. We often think about cross-training as an athletic practice, but when we ‘cross-learn,’ we create an environment in which innovation can occur. Many of the objects that we use in our everyday lives — the iPod, Google, medicines — were invented because someone borrowed ideas from a different discipline.

#2: Ask them to visualize their future.

What does your teenager want to do in a few years? How does she want to spend her time everyday? Regularly checking in with your teenager or asking them to think about where they will be in five years or ten years sounds like a hokey activity, but research shows that the practice of imagining one’s future makes it easier for anyone to recognize the concrete steps they need to move towards that path. For teenagers, this means finishing high school and either attending college or learning marketable skills through internships or on-the-job experience. When your teenager is more aware of what he wants to do in the future, he’ll be more likely to make connections between his coursework and that future. When I taught freshman composition to a group of nursing students, they were the most engaged class I ever had. Why? Because they understood that they needed to learn how to clearly communicate in order to be successful nurses.

Even if your teenager changes her mind about what she wants to be when she ‘grows’ up, the regular practice of connecting her present activities with her future plans means she’ll start a new career path with a workshop of useful tools.

#3: Help them connect the present to that future.

When you ask your teenager what he or she learned in school each day, you have an excellent opportunity to connect what they’re thinking about in school to things that you’ve experienced as a family — a movie you watched together, the news report you listened to on the way to school, the discussion you had at dinner the night before, and so forth. Often when teenagers are ground down by endless homework, they may not be able to make these associations themselves. Reminding them that learning about Watergate might help us evaluate knotty ethical issues can re-energize their interest in their homework because it helps them see the relevance of that homework. It also reminds students why we learn: because it helps us make sense of our world, whether that’s understanding big ideas or how to most effectively pay off student loan debt.

Another thing parents can do is read widely about their teenager’s interests. When I taught that writing class to nursing students, I started each class by asking, ‘did you hear about that meningitis scare?’, ‘did you see what the latest medical research said about chocolate?’, and so forth. Generally my students were too busy to follow current health care news, but this is precisely what they need to know to talk to professionals in their field, to keep up with cutting-edge research, and to know how their patients might react to specific treatment plans. When you share a news article with your teenager about something that intrigues them, they know that you believe their interests are valuable. They also learn how their interests intersect with other people and diverse careers.

While parents have a huge influence in their teenager’s academic success, teenagers still spend the bulk of their weeks at school. So how should we be teaching our students? I’ll provide one answer in my next post, but feel free to share your ideas on the Facebook page.

]]>http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/05/19/home/how-to-motivate-your-teenager/feed/0Are We Failing Our Kids?http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/05/07/home/are-we-failing-our-kids/
http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/05/07/home/are-we-failing-our-kids/#commentsWed, 07 May 2014 20:18:56 +0000http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/?p=36I’ve worked in schools for over a decade. But in many ways they’ve all been broken. They’re expensive. Some students thrived in a structured environment, while others scrunched themselves in their seats and hoped I wouldn’t notice them. The skills I taught often reflected the demands of my own specialized discipline rather than preparing students for the tasks they would do after finishing school. And I taught my classes in a vacuum — sealed from the other classes in the school and often even from the same department I was teaching in. Which isn’t to say that I and other teachers didn’t work hard within these constraints to teach meaningful lessons.

But something essential was still missing from the education process.

While I don’t have the — or even an – answer about how to solve this problem, here are a few articles that are informing how I think about the possibilities for hacking our educational system.

SIR ROBINSON’S TED TALK

Sir Ken Robinson, a creativity expert, argues that we need a radically different perspective on education and educational systems. In a TED talk, he outlines the problem: our model of education is based on out-moded philosophical, economic, and intellectual ideas that are better suited to preparing students for factory jobs than for the challenging knowledge-based economy that’s developing. Furthermore, he points out that these educational systems do not reflect how students learn or why they are become motivated to do so. When this system doesn’t work for a child, the question becomes not how to improve the system, but how to change the child. Sir Robinson connects the rise of ADHD drugs to the industrial education complex, arguing that neither serve the interests of the child or society.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN STUDENTS DON’T LOOK MOTIVATED

While Sir Robinson’s association between the school system and the rise of ADHD diagnoses might seem extreme, Alan Schwartz writes in the New York Times that scientists and drug makers have identified a new pyschological disturbance that affects student’s academic performance. The diagnosis classifies those students who routinely daydream and/or are inattentive in class as suffering from SCT, or sluggish cognitive tempo. And listening to the words of one researcher is chilling: children who suffer from SCT “[are] the daydreamy ones, the ones with work that’s not turned in, [who] leav[e] names off of papers or skip questions, things like that, that impinge on grades or performance. So anything we can do to understand what’s going on with these kids is a good thing.” The diagnosis of SCT appears to be based on a child’s inability to harmonize with an ordered classroom — the same industrial classroom that Sir Robinson discusses. But daydreaming is also a symptom of creativity and inattentivness can signal boredom in school, lack of attention, or a very different concern altogether. Surpisingly, there’s been very little research done to evaluate the differences between being creative, not having a school structure that works for you, and having SCT. There is a very real danger –as we’ve seen in the over-use of ADHD drugs/diagnoses — that we’ll over-medicate creative and dreamy students merely because they don’t correspond to the rubric of what a ‘student’ should look and behave like.

WHAT MOTIVATES STUDENTS

When students are inattentive in class, why is this happening? A recent Gallup poll suggests one reason: teenagers are more likely to be “bored” than challenged in school (50% to 31%). A bored student slumps in his chair or inconsistently engages with material she doesn’t see the relevance of.

A bored student needs a different learning environment, not a different mental one.

And educators are discussing how to radically reconstitute and reshape the school environment. Katrina Schwartz, in “What Would be a Radically Different Vision of School?”, explores what such a vision could entail: schools would support “inquiry-based, student-centered learning, where students are encouraged to find entry points into the mandated curriculum in ways that are meaningful to them.” School would be less focused on specific content and measurable goals and more focused on the skills of learning: research, analysis, synthesis, innovation, creativity. When the building blocks of learning are emphasized, students are better prepared to adapt to an ever-changing world.

BUT WHAT DOES A NEW EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE?

Isolated schools and systems have started to experiment with various aspects of a new vision for the school system, but how do we actually change the conversation and ask how to re-imagine the educational system rather than simply revise its current structure?

]]>http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/05/07/home/are-we-failing-our-kids/feed/15 Ways to Survive the Doldrums of Spring Breakhttp://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/04/23/home/5-ways-to-survive-the-doldrums-of-spring-break/
http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/04/23/home/5-ways-to-survive-the-doldrums-of-spring-break/#commentsWed, 23 Apr 2014 19:14:16 +0000http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/?p=28Once the relief of being on Spring Break has worn off, what does everyone do with 168 hours of free time? Here are five suggestions for fun diversions your teenagers can do in the few hours or a day’s time. I’ve chosen these projects because they recapture the delight in learning something just new because it’s intriguing or novel. (But these projects also secretly build creative and critical thinking skills. It’s like putting squash in cupcakes.)

#1: LEARN BASIC DESIGN SKILLS

We have somehow developed a myth: ‘creativity and good design’ require inspiration and genius to implement. But anyone can understand the basic aesthetic and organizing principles behind design — and they should.

Why?

Because design is essentially about asking: ‘what is in front of me?’, ‘what is it similar to?’, and ‘what could it be transformed into?’ and so thinking about good design practices encourages critical thinking. Design skills are problem-solving skills.

The following two resources give kids and teenagers projects that engage with real-world design needs: design a sports team logo, redesign the book cover for your favorite book, build a bridge with items from your pantry, create a plan for a local park or playground.

*Kidsthinkdesign (free) offers ten different design sections about everything from graphic design to environmental design. Each project asks teenagers to consider how design permeates the world we live in and how they can creatively change that world.

Not everyone wants to be a computer programmer, but the logical structures that underpin coding offer important lessons. And who doesn’t want to show off the magic 8 ball application they coded themselves? A number of websites teach the necessary patterns of thought that govern programming, its logical progression of ideas, and don’t ask learners to worry about mastering a programming language. Being able to code successfully means being able to think through the process your user goes through: when they click on this button, what happens? what if they click here instead? etc.

MIT’s AppInventor (free) invites students with no coding background to experiment with the building blocks of coding: linking specific user inputs with specific outputs. Instead of having students write a programming language, they create blocks of code that students manipulate to, for example, make their phone talk back to them.

And if your teenager loves video games, there are a number of websites that enable kids to easily create interactive game play. MIT’s Scratch (free) is one of the most popular, but Games for Change also lists further options here.

#3: PUBLISH YOUR WRITING (or just write for fun)

Does your teen write whenever he or she has a chance? Has he or she ever sent anything out for publication? There are dozens of small magazines that exclusively accept work from teenagers (and even younger children too). Here are two fantastic resources: one from Teen Ink and another from New Pages.

Even if your teenager doesn’t write for publication, the regular practice of journaling improves mental health and academic success. People journal for many reasons: to recount their experiences with or as vampires (the Vampire Diaries is a show about journal-writing), to reflect on and work through events that stress them out, to make plans, to explore tentative new ideas, to become more self-aware, and so forth. Plus, the practice of regular writing helps students write more naturally on exams and papers and helps them develop more confidence in their ideas and how they express them.

#4: LEARN IMPROV

Improv has grown beyond its acting roots — while actors use improv to create memorable, one-time-only performances, it’s also used to help people become more comfortable extemporaneously speaking or learning how to tell a story. More surprisingly, businesses use improv to help their employees think outside the box, think and act collaboratively, and so forth. It benefits everyone from students who need to be able to communicate who they are to a college admission committee to business teams who need to create a product together.

How do you learn improv without taking a class? Three steps: first, grab some good friends; second, learn the rules; and, finally, practice them. (Yes, practicing improv is important because that’s how you learn how to think on your feet when it matters!)

#5: RELAX

These days, we’re all over-scheduled and our kids are feeling the pressure. But when we always race around, it’s hard to find the time to think — and it’s this reflection time that breeds creativity. Instead of thinking about relaxation as ‘wasted time,’ encourage your kids to unwind in ways that refresh them and stimulate new thinking. Encourage them to spend an entire hour of unscheduled time — time in which each of them has to entertain himself. Remember when they were young and you could throw them in the yard and they would do just that? Help your kids recover that self-sufficiency: send them outdoors (the nature deficit is real), encourage them to daydream and stare out into space (this will help them focus when it matters), and so forth. And let them take naps — not only will make them smarter, but most of teenagers are sleep-deprived (because they needmore than 9 hours of sleep each night and rarely get it).

Looking for more ideas? Each day this week I’m posting an additional way to hack your spring break on Facebook and Twitter. Add some of your own — tweet to #hackspringbreak or post on Hacking Education’s wall!

]]>http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/04/23/home/5-ways-to-survive-the-doldrums-of-spring-break/feed/0Hacking the Economyhttp://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/04/18/home/hacking-the-economy/
http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/04/18/home/hacking-the-economy/#commentsFri, 18 Apr 2014 20:27:54 +0000http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/?p=26In my first two posts, I focused on general philosophies I’ve found essential to developing my thinking about how we learn. Future posts will offer practical suggestions for how to hack your teenager’s education.

Too often young adults wait till the end of their high school or college years to make career plans, and many parents worry that if they ask teenagers to prepare for a career too soon, they’ll become locked into that career path. I think the earlier teenagers begin preparing for a possible career, the better. It’s true that teenagers will likely change career plans many times during the course of a few years. But I think they should still actively prepare for each of those career paths! Anyone who has focused intensely on a topic for a period of time will have interesting experiences to talk about, will learn skills that can transfer to other jobs, and will be more engaging conversationalists. Each of these experiences is vital when writing a college admission essay, interviewing for a job, or generally enjoying life.

INFORMATIONAL INTERVIEWS

Often teenagers (and even adults) may know what they’d like to be when they ‘grow up,’ but they aren’t sure precisely how to move along that career path. We then spend a lot of time in dead-end jobs or classes because we don’t know which ones will best prepare us for a specific career. When I transitioned from academia to a business career, I was routinely advised to conduct ‘informational interviews.’ In such an interview, you ask someone who works in a field you’re interested in about their day-to-day experiences and how they arrived at their job.

For teenagers, an informational interview is the perfect opportunity to learn about a career before committing much time to it and to gain expert advice about what specific steps they can take to prepare for that career. These interviews also give teenagers contacts in their chosen field who might later let them know when internships or summer jobs become available. (It’s considered bad form to use an informational interview to ask for a job or internship.)

HOW TO CONDUCT AN INFORMATIONAL INTERVIEW

Most of us have little experience interviewing people. Encourage your teenagers to practice asking questions with a friend or family member — they’ll quickly learn which questions lead to more productive answers, how to ask sound followup questions, and how to pace the interview.

Most informational interviews are 15-30 minutes in length and take place in person. In general, the following categories and questions will be helpful, but teenagers should carefully think about why they are interested in this particular career path and determine in advance what they want to learn from the interview. They should spend time with Google, learning about the industry and the person they’ll interview. When they conduct the interview, they can avoid asking questions that they could easily find out another way.

Here’s a sample template, which should absolutely be adapted for the particular career and person your teenager would be interviewing. Depending on how much your teenager already knows about the career, he or she might want to spend more or less time on certain questions or question categories.

SUGGESTED TEMPLATE FOR INFORMATIONAL INTERVIEWS

Start the interview discussing why you’re interested in the career path and what you’d like to learn about today. This lets the interviewee target their answers to your specific goals.

Open your questions by learning more about the person you’re interviewing: Why did you choose this career path? How did you start in the field? How did you get your current job?

Continue by getting a feel for the culture of their career: What do you love about this job/career? What would you change about it? What does a typical day look like? What types of tasks do you usually do in a given month? What kind of people do you work with regularly?

Make sure to ask about the larger industry too: How do you see the industry changing over the next 5-10 years? What other careers are similar to the one that you do?

Find out what you should be doing right now — and over the next 4-8 years — to prepare for this career: What background, skills, and temperament does one need for this job? What courses, extracurricular activities, internships would you recommend I take in order to prepare for this career? What books/magazines/trade journals should I start reading to learn about the field [Start reading those now!]

Finish by thanking them for their time. You might also ask if they can recommend anyone else to talk to about this career.

And don’t forget to send a prompt thank-you note; include a concrete action you took as a result of the interview so the interviewee knows how they’ve helped you out.

CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION:

I’ve started a Facebook page for Hacking Education. During Spring Break, I’ll share examples of what your teenager can do to hack spring break. I also hope you’ll share examples of what your family is doing to hack Spring Break on Facebook or tweet them to #hackspringbreak. Feel free to use the Facebook page to talk further about the articles I’ve posted, offer your own perspective and advice, ask questions, and so forth.

]]>http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/04/18/home/hacking-the-economy/feed/0The First Secret to Hacking Educationhttp://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/04/09/home/the-first-secret-to-hacking-education/
http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/2014/04/09/home/the-first-secret-to-hacking-education/#commentsThu, 10 Apr 2014 01:58:21 +0000http://hackingeducation.bangordailynews.com/?p=23When I was in kindergarten, I took an IQ test. Wait too long, my parents were told, and you can’t accurately judge ‘native intellectual ability.’ So at 5 years old, my ability was quantified and crystalized: verbal good, math not so much.

Fast forward a number of years, and I decide to write an iPhone app. When I struggle to learn programming languages, I’m encouraged to experiment, to use each failed test to eliminate a wrong approach, and I eventually learn to code increasingly complex programs.

FIXED VS. GROWTH MINDSETS

Dr. Carol Dweck (Stanford University) has spent decades studying how students react when exposed to difficult material: some students reject difficult projects or material because they feel they ‘aren’t wired that way’ while others view such challenges as intriguing puzzles. The first group believes they are successful only if they already know how to solve the problem, while the latter group approaches difficult problems by problem-solving and breaking complex problems down into simpler steps until they figure the problem out.

Dweck argues that the first group has a fixed mindset because they believe that talents and intellectual ability are innate and unchanging — what we are born with, we die with and nothing we do in the decades intervening will let us measurably improve our abilities in a particular area. She contrasts this with the second group’s growth mindset, which in her words,

“is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.”

STRATEGIES TO PROMOTE A GROWTH MINDSET

Understanding Dweck’s research is essential to my larger exploration of how to hack education — we will learn only if we first believe that we can learn. When we teach children that they can improve, they become willing to try new things, regardless of how difficult those things are. When we train children to adopt a growth mindset, they do not view failure as the end of a project, but as a clue that they need to approach that problem from a different angle.

Failure becomes a diagnostic tool rather than a label.

So, how do parents adopt strategies that encourage growth mindsets? Dweck’s book encourages parents to change how they talk to their kids about the learning process. Instead of praising a child’s ability, she recommends that parents focus on how their children achieved (or didn’t achieve) a particular goal. For example, encouraging kids to view a bad test grade as evidence that they need to study the material differently rather than just claiming to be ‘bad’ at math. And vice versa, reminding a child that the A+ she just made reflects how much studying she did rather than any innate talent at math. Dweck argues that this approach will improve kids’ academic improvement because it teaches kids that improvement is a product of effort and not (just) of talent.

WHAT A GROWTH MINDSET LEAVES OUT

Some studies have struggled to replicate Dweck’s findings. They find that only some students benefit from shifting to a new mindset, while others tend to sabotage their own work, even when they know that they can improve if they try harder. I think this is because Dweck’s work does not teach students how to improve, just that they can. Knowing that I can learn to write an iPhone app doesn’t make me less frustrated when I’m not sure why my code doesn’t work. For kids (and adults!) who may not be trained in problem solving or critical thinking, knowing they can improve and actually doing so can be a very different challenge. And if we cannot diagnose why we always fail, we will easily slip back into a fixed mindset. Dr. Dweck’s research leaves out any extensive discussion of how to think critically or deeply about problems.

While her research is a vital place to start an exploration of how to hack education, it’s only the beginning.